Tag: conferences

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JAX London – I learn stuff and meet people

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I'm looking at you....)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

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On The Similarities Between Girls And Aliens

I discovered, through the power of the search words that lead to my blog, that there was an incident at JavaOne that once again opens the can of worms that is Sexism In IT.

This Makes Me Sad. I had a really positive experience at JavaOne. In fact, I would say it was the one conference I've been to in the last 12 months where I felt like my gender wasn't a problem - I even got away with wearing hotpants (tweed is business-casual, right??) without being mistaken for anything other than a developer.

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JavaOne 2011

So, I'm off to JavaOne next week!

This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I'll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that's not going to get confusing at all). Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about... everything. Most importantly for the LJC he's representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role.

I'm really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who'll talk to me. It's the first international conference I've been to and I'm hoping to meet people I wouldn't normally get a chance to see in London. It's also really cool to be able to represent both LMAX and the London Java Community. Hopefully it won't lead to some sort of split personality syndrome.

Almost more excitingly, I'll be doing a spot of shopping in New York on the way there and back. Because, well, it would be rude to fly over to the States and not drop in on my old home.

Maybe I'll get a chance to catch up with some of you in one of those amazing cities...?

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STAC London Summit

On Wednesday I tagged along to the STAC London Summit to provide backup for Mike, who was on the "The Future of Messaging Middleware" panel.

The panel consisted of two messaging providers, one hardware (Solace Systems) and one software (29West/Informatica), and two "users", Citihub and LMAX. Obviously both providers were arguing that theirs was the best solution. But what I found interesting is that I came away with the impression that everyone was really on the same side - everyone wants to use or to provide the best system, but there are different approaches. Which one you adopt is likely to be influenced by how your team work and the hardware you have (or can obtain).

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FogBugs and Kiln World Tour

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to get a place on the FogBugz and Kiln World Tour. I booked it before I moved jobs, and I'll be honest I had no real interest in the software. I've been reading Joel's books and blogs since my friend Brent bought me Joel on Software and made me read it (he had the foresight to know I'd want to hang on to his copy if he'd lent it to me!). I wanted to see the man in the flesh and hear what he had to say about his software. Because really, do we honestly need yet another bug-tracking / project-management tool?

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